Link importance-based network recovery for large-scale failures in smart grids

Large-scale natural disaster or malicious attacks could cause serious damages to the communication network in smart grids. If the damaged network cannot be recovered timely, greater threat will be brought to the secure and stable operation of smart grids. In this paper, a link importance-based network recovery method for large-scale failures in smart grids has been proposed. Firstly, the link importance for the network can be obtained according to the link importance for the service type and the importance of the service type for the network; secondly, a network recovery model, which is 0–1 integer programming, has been established to recover more important communication services with limited recovery resources; finally, we propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem and reduce the computational expenditure. The simulation experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The simulation results illustrate that our network recovery method is applicable to the large-scale failures and the link which carries the high-priority service can be first recovered in this paper, thus which further ensures the safe and stable operation of smart grids.